The essay was never published in his lifetime, and has been cobbled together
from existing lecture notes that Thoreau himself picked over for his other
writings, such as Walden and A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Probably for this reason it
hasn’t received nearly as much attention as his more well-known essays.

But it is much more readable than some of the other writings I’ve
been collecting. That is to say that the modern reader can read the essay and
follow Thoreau’s arguments without at the same time having to unravel their
references to figures of regional notoriety or to political controversies that
have long since been forgotten. And it expands on Thoreau’s political
philosophy and shows off some good examples of his rhetorical wit.

The lecture reflects Thoreau’s frustration with the multitude of reformers — prohibitionists, utopian communists, free love advocates, religious
revivalists, and the like — who were roaming about New England at the time
hawking their prescriptions for a better world. (As an aside,
Thoreau’s journal entry of
17 June 1853 is a particularly amusing
rant about this.)

Thoreau’s audience in Boston were of the open-minded liberal variety — people
who were typically the most interested in and the most vulnerable to the
charms of these reformers — and so Thoreau begins his lecture slyly with a
fairly superficial but probably sympathetic attack on the Reformer’s great
enemy: the Conservative. Further disarming his audience with a witticism or
two, he then turns on them by spending the rest of the lecture attacking the
major genre of lecturers that they more typically come to hear: the Reformer.

His major complaint is much the same as the one he expressed when reviewing
John Etzler’s technological utopianism (see
The Picket Line15 February 2007) — that the
utopianists, and Reformers in general, are too concerned with exerting control
over and reshaping The World, or Society, or The Government, or The Family,
and not concerned enough about better using the control they already exercise
over themselves:

He suspects that these Reformers are acting from some subconscious motive (or,
using less psychoanalytic terms: “some obscure, and perhaps unrecognized
private grievance”) that is overtly philanthropic, but covertly a scheme for
avoiding the real necessity for self-reform.

He reminds the Reformers that they speak with their deeds more than with their
words — that if “the lecturer against the use of money is paid for his
lecture, … that is the precept which [men] hear and believe, and they have a
great deal of sympathy with him” — and noting that it’s easy to
lecture about “non-resistance” but the proof of the pudding is when
“one Mr. Resistance” steps forward to take
part in the debate.

So he recommends that Reformers, and those interested in Reform, instead work
on themselves. He anticipates the objection that would invert his argument by
saying that he is recommending a narcissistic evasion of responsibility for
grappling with social problems. The problems of the social order, of the
political order, of the family, and so on, Thoreau insists, are rooted in
individuals — the corrupt institutions are only the symptom:

I’ve also added to the collection
Wendell Phillips Before
Concord Lyceum. This letter-to-the-editor is full of praise for
Phillips, and its contrast with the scolding
Reformers essay marks some boundaries of what
Thoreau considered valuable in political debate.

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